To be silent and to speak up
by supernavy97
Summary: To love Amelia is the right thing to do. In a world consumed by hate, sorrow, lies and betrayals; in a reality where death defeats life so many times: to love Amelia is the right thing to do, you tell yourself. Maybe you don't actually believe it. Probably, after trying so hard to convince yourself, you have started to. [Crowen]


**To be silent and to speak up**

[To love Amelia is the right thing to do.  
In a world consumed by hate, sorrow, lies and betrayals; in a reality where death defeats life so many times: to love Amelia is the right thing to do, you tell yourself.  
Maybe you don't actually believe it.  
Probably, after trying so hard to convince yourself, you have started to.]

 _ **To be silent**_

 **1.** **To be a person**. [12x06 – "The me nobody knows"]

Meredith walks beneath a light rain: the raindrops are itches on her face, wetting the small parts of skin left uncovered by the hospital jacket. The capital letters of the building behind her back are sewed on the bluish fabric, subject of the changes everyone had the bad luck to witness: the Seattle Grace Mercy West (or Mercy Death as they used to call it) was a long forgotten memory, crashed by the cycle of events that have lead to a new name, to a new reality, unpredictable and fascinating, but survivor of lots of defeats.  
Owen is standing still beneath a sky without stars, that night, lying back on the ambulance still parked in the yard. Amelia has just left, without answers and with delusion written all over her face. But it doesn't matter. It actually hasn't ever. Not with her.  
Meredith reaches him in silence, and lays beside him, staring at nothing.  
She knows.  
She knows how to name that emptiness that they both feel, she knows the reason of that much loneliness and sorrow. She knows what it means not to have a person you can open up to, a person you can rely on.  
However, she also doesn't know. Not completely. Because she still has Alex whereas he doesn't have anyone anymore.  
"I made a _promise_ to _Cristina_ that _I wouldn't let you go_ dark and twisty. That I'd be your person if you needed one".  
Owen starts a little, slightly, both for Riggs' memories of the day that are so still in him, like knives ready to cut, and for that name that he hasn't hear in so long and that every time makes his heart stop for a second.  
Meredith can't be his person, they both know, but today she's the closest one to be.  
He needs somebody who doesn't care to know just to be the centre of attention, he needs somebody who listens, somebody who doesn't judge, somebody who he doesn't need to justify with because she already knows. Somebody who understands him without talking because talking, today, hurts too much.  
He doesn't tell her, Owen, that he wants his real person back, that he wants everything back, that he can't breath without her. He doesn't tell her, Owen, that Amelia is a great surgeon, funny and a bit crazy, but nothing compared to the hurricane that Christina was: a small shadow behind that sun that never stopped shining.  
So he decides to let the conversation down, in order not to hurt anyone anymore.  
"I don't want to talk about it"  
And Meredith knows what he's talking about, she can feel that alienation, that homesickness, but she respects him so she decides to let the conversation down too, avoiding the real topic and leading it to the day events.  
"Just tell me: we hate him?"  
Owen answers impulsevily, but he believes his words, those words that today are for everyone, in a way.  
"We hate him".

 **2.** **The illusion of true love**. [12x24 – "Family affairs"]

Owen argues with the cuff links of a suit that doesn't belong to him, he moves his fingers and wrinkle his forehead, without concluding anything. Suddently the door opens and a hurried Meredith enters, squeezed in a purple dress that gives her elegance and an amazing beauty.  
Owen tries to smile while she's helping him to get ready.  
"Big day today" she states without raising her sight.  
He chuckles. She wants to make him talk, he knows it, it is so obvious. But he tries with all his strenghts to fight back, not to fall in her trap: they both know that sooner or later he will have to stop pretending and accept that reality that doesn't fit for him, that new life that under the happily surface hides all his undealed demons. Sooner or later he will have to admit that Amelia is nothing more than a perfect dream he likes to grab to, an ephimeral illusion in which he likes to drawn but that's neither true nor real.  
"Big step"  
Really big step, he tells himself.  
"Really big step" she repeats.  
Owen tries to resist, hoping that his conscience of what it's right and what it's wrong doesn't decide to speak up right now. He do hope to manage to get away from his responsabilities: not those to the world, but the ones to himself. Those responsabilities that whisper to him at night and remind him of the lies he's living as a life.  
But he has to hold on, at least for today, in order to lose himself into the fairy tail of a satisfing future with Amelia.  
"Meredith, why do you have a problem with me marrying your sister?"  
"I don't, but I'm responsible" she says; "I mean, he left her to me, and she left you to me"  
Owen suffocates the shivers that attack his body at the thought of Cristina. It was what he had tried so hard to avoid: to think of her. To think and remember everything they had shared in that marriage that hadn't been perfect, but that had matched, separated and brought them back to each other.  
He sights, remembering: "I'm not a piece of property for Cristina to just hand over for safekeeping"  
It hurts to say her name, but he tries not to think about it, to get over it.  
Meredith lowers her sight, sat on an armchair whose velvet reminds of the colors of her dress. She gets a little dark, like everytime her memory goes back in years, witness of a far-away love.  
"I haven't told her. Does she know?" she asks then, with slighlty wet eyes.  
Owen looks at her with dry eyes and a fluttering heart, instead.  
"No"  
"Don't you think you should call her and tell her before you do this?" she asks again.  
"Why wuld I do that?"  
Owen feels like a liar. He actually is. He knows exactly why should he do it and that's the exact reason he hadn't. Because calling Cristina would have meant to confirm the doubts and lies that stick his relationship with Amelia. And that's what he wanted to avoid. He doesn't need confirmations, Owen, he knows that he wouldn't find them because at the very last he knows that it is wrong and hurried and insicure, but it is what he has been longing for: a moment of undisturbed peace.  
And he knows that she's not the one he dreams to spend his life with, the one whose hair he wants to wash in a summer morning or the one he wants to cook the Christmas' breakfast to. He knows. Damn well he knows that Amelia isn't his true love! He knows it as you know that life is unfair, that the good ones don't always win over the bad ones. However, he tries to believe they can manage to have a happy ending. Even a fake one.  
"She was the love of your life. If it were me, I would call Derek. I don't know…just to see if it came close to what we had"

 _ **To speak up**_

 **3.** **Something real.** [13x17 – "Till I hear it from you"]

It was a hard case, the one of that morning. They discussed about procedures, but in the end Amelia decided to operate and it have gone well. He's happy now, Owen, he's satisfied of their work and he's almost heppy of having been wrong.  
"Nice job!" he says, walking out the intensive unit care, but her words hit him as bullets, so suddently, so unexpected.  
"I don't care what you think" she spits, with resentment.  
"Amelia stop…"  
But she doesn't seem willing to calm down as every word gets her angrier and angrier.  
"You don't have any right on opinion. You certainly don't have the right of bullying me"  
Owen is shocked, surprised by the hypocrisy she's speaking with. Even though maybe it's not that surprising.  
"Bull you?"  
"You don't have the right to give me ultimatums about when to come home and make up my mind"  
The memory of his empy bed that morning and of the mornings before comes to his mind in a rush. Her words are unfair and she knows. She's the one who has run away, who has abandoned him at the first obstacle and he knows that marriage isn't easy, he knows so damn well, but he tried and he's trying so much that it hurts. It hurts to fight alone, it's hard and it doesn't seem being worth it.  
But he holds on, Owen, because that illusion of love is everything he has now.  
"Ok"  
"For better and for worse. That's what you said" she afirms and he remembers it, he remembers those words. It is the for worse. He had told Cristina too when she had run away. But she came back, almost immediatly, conscious of her responsabilities, conscious that if she had stayed, if she had fought, the _for better_ would have come too. "Well guess what? This is the for worse. And you don't have the right to just decide that I don't have myself together. You don't make me the one who is wrong. I'm tired of being the messed up one because I'm not. You're at least as messed up as me"  
And he is, for sure. Full of demons of war, demons of the past. Arid of hope as the woman he's seeing in front of him is no longer the one he has dreamt a future with.  
"You disappeared!"  
And then there they are, those words, so cruel, so violent in their semplicity. Those words she hadn't the right to say, not after everything he had told her, not after the memories he shared, opening uo to a person he had hoped was mature enough not to bring them up to him.  
"You are _suffocating_ me!"  
Owen feels his eyes getting wetter.  
"That is unfair"  
"Really?" She asks then, and Owen is about to answer but she moves up and it is the straw that breaks the camel's back: "I would _love_ to ask _Cristina_ how suffocated she felt by you. By your needs, by your idea of a baby, by what you want".  
And it hurts. It hurts so much he can feel his heart breaking and his chest screaming in pain.  
He suffocated Cristina, for real. Both phisically and mentally. He knows. But she forgave him, she told him that she knew her limits and it wasn't just enough to let him go, that she could handle it. And they had been supporting each other until their dreams weren't just the same anymore and she had to go away. But they understood each other anyway: she understood his desire of having kids and she was willing to give up her happiness with him _for him_ as well as he was willing to give up that same happiness in order to let her go to follow her dreams.  
Amelia, on the other hand, didn't understand.  
She had run away and she hadn't come back but she was still convinced to be right.  
She had told him that she wanted kids, they had dreamt together about a big wedding and an even bigger future with a house with a garden, five babies and a dog maybe. But now she was screaming in the hallway that those were just _his_ dreams and that she felt suffocated by them. She believed she was a victim.  
Owen can't handle it anymore and in a moment of madness he stops to pretend, he stops to believe in that fairy tail he have never actually believed in. It's the moment to speak up.  
"She loved me" he screams this time, "She stayed" he adds, breathing very deeply before going on, looking at her straight in the eyes: "Before leaving, she stayed. And she tried. Maybe you're right, maybe I suffocated her with my needs. Maybe she had other needs, other ideas of a future. But you-" he points at her, "You didn't. You had my same needs, my same ideas. Or at least you pretended to have them until it wasn't funny anymore to play with my feelings. Because that's what you did and that's the exact difference between you and her: you pretended, you deceived me. She was sincere, and sincere and honest and real was what we shared. And yes, I'm messed up too. God, Amelia, you have no idea, but you shouldn't bring it up to me like it was a race to see who's the most messed up. You should have supported me as I have supported you. You should have accepted me as I accepted you. As she supported me, as she accepted me. And maybe you're right, maybe Meredith isn't as loyal to you as she is to Cristina. But it's normal, Amelia. Cristina have lived here, she created this place, she is part of this as she's part of Meredith as she's part of _me_. And you cannot expect to come here and delete everything, you cannot expect to become immediatly that person. You cannot take her place"  
He stops for a moment, staring at her dark guilty eyes, not caring anymore.  
"But you could have become my person" He says "You really could have".


End file.
